Berry pleased to meet you

Less is more. You hear it all the time nowadays, in commercials for just about everything. Oftentimes, it’s just a sad excuse for a clever line about saving money. Sometimes, however, it is most definitely a true statement. One of the fields in which this platitude holds true is, of course, cooking, and in particular flavor. It’s hard not to get carried away when thinking up a recipe, and that’s what happened to me with this bread pudding. While the blueberry, chocolate, and walnut flavors were fine individually, they didn’t mesh with each other, and instead of making a chocolate-blueberry-walnut bread putting, I ended up making a chocolate bread pudding and a blueberry bread pudding (with some walnuts on top) in the same baking dish. All this goes to show, that when flavoring a dish, keep it simple stupid, because less is more and the pen is mightier than the sword (sorry, got carried away with the cliches there).

Ingredients:

4 eggs

1/2 cup of milk, plus extra for the chocolate sauce

Vanilla

Nutmeg

Stale challah

Frozen blueberries

Sugar

Baking soda

Semisweet chocolate

Chopped walnuts

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350°F and grease a baking dish.

Tear the challah into pieces and place in the baking dish.

Mix the eggs, 1/2 cup of milk, vanilla, and nutmeg nutmeg in a medium bowl.

Pour this custard over the challah, moving the challah around as necessary to absorb it all.

Bake at 350°F for 35 minutes.

Add the blueberries, sugar, and baking soda to a saucepan over medium heat. As the blueberries begin to decompose, add more sugar and baking soda (and maybe some water), in order to remove the blueberry chunks and reach the desired consistency. The sauce will be smooth without the use of a food processor due to the second law of thermodynamics, which dictates the… sorry.

Microwave the semisweet chocolate and some milk to create a quick chocolate sauce.

Mix the walnuts into the chocolate sauce.

Remove the challah from the oven. Pour the blueberry sauce and chocolate sauce over the challah.

Place back in the oven and bake for another 10 minutes at 350°F.

Why this recipe is good for college students: By using stale challah, this recipe takes advantage of trait among college students, forgetfulness, which is usually disparaged, and turns it into a positive. Additionally, bread pudding is the perfect thing to sit around and scoop with a bunch of friends.

Why this recipe is good for those who keep Kosher: Microwave chocolate sauces are best when made with real milk. This being a dairy dessert already due to the milk in the custard makes it practical to use that superior type of chocolate sauce.

What I would do differently if I made this recipe again

If I were making this recipe again, I would use only one the flavors, for the reasons discussed above.

Additionally, I would mix this flavor into the custard itself instead of just pouring it on, in the hopes of achieving a more consistent flavor.